Bitcoin shows its wild streak within minutes Wednesday

Bitcoin jumped to a 17-month high Wednesday before losing some $1,800 of its value within minutes, showing how unstable the cryptocurrency market continues to be. Photo by Dave Hunt/EPA-EFE

June 27 (UPI) -- The cryptocurrency Bitcoin survived a volatile swing Wednesday that saw its value reach a 17-month high before crashing within hours.

Bitcoin reached a high of $13,485.85 per coin, the highest it had been January 2018, the website CoinDesk reported.

But as the day went on, Bitcoin tumbled back down to $11,200 over a 15-hour period. Bloomberg reported that $1,800 of that freefall came in a 10-minute stretch.

"A 20 percent-30 percent pullback would not be surprising and very consistent with Bitcoin's recent bull-market pullbacks," Robert Sluymer, a technical strategist at Fundstrat Global Advisors, wrote in a research note.

Bitcoin's problem Wednesday came at roughly the same time that the cryptocurrency trading platform Coinbase suffered an outage.

Coinbase was out "for a short period of time due to high volume," the platform's representative told CNBC Wednesday.

It was a tough time overall for cryptocurrencies. According to CoinDesk statistics, 16 of the top 20 cryptocurrencies had experienced double-digit losses over the last 24 hours, with none of them showing gains.

Overall, Bitcoin remains up more than 200 percent this year, but still nowhere close to its record, $20,000 per coin it reached in December 2017.

Bitcoin's value had increased almost 30 percent since Facebook announced that it was getting into cryptocurrency game with its Libra project. Facebook said last week that Libra would allow its users to send money around the world for free as easily as they share a text message or a photo, potentially revolutionizing the cryptocurrency industry.